This is an edited version of the paper presented to
the Philosophical Society's 2009 Conference in honour of the British philosopher,
Timothy Sprigge.

Timothy Sprigge was the last of the
great British Idealists beginning with George Berkeley and continuing into
the nineteenth century with F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Edward Caird
and T. H. Green. I say the 'last idealist' of this tradition because Sprigge
was certainly an anomaly in the twentieth century. His actual birth date
of 14 January 1932 was just exactly a hundred years off the mark, for his
thought and character were distinctively that of a nineteenth century English
gentleman who wrote philosophy in the grand style of an Absolute Idealist.
He also appreciated and was much influenced by American philosophers of
this period as well. William James and Josiah Royce figure prominently
in his idealist metaphysics, both in terms of methodology and content.
Charles Hartshorne enthusiastically said of Sprigge that he was the leading
expert on American philosophy in England and had very few competitors in
this specialty.

Given that the Anglo-American orthodoxy of the twentieth
century regarded idealism as an antiquated relic thoroughly abandoned with
the critiques of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and Sprigge's own teacher,
A. J. Ayer, Sprigge choose as a title for his magnum opus one that
would almost certainly guarantee failure--The Vindication of Absolute
Idealism (1983). For the most part, it attracted attention for his
bold affront to philosophical fashion and gained a following with those
who sought a third way between the banality of analysis and irrationality
of Continental trends. His other major works include the large scale studies:
James
and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (1993) and
The God
of Metaphysics: Being a Study of the Metaphysics and Religious Doctrines
of Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah
Royce, A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and Concluding with a Defense
of Pantheistic Idealism (2006). At the time of his death he was working
on The Phenomenology of Thought and a concluding chapter of a Festschrift
responding to critics. Always the philosopher, on his deathbed he said
that the experience provided the opportunity to write a phenomenology of
dying.

Against the Flow

In an age devoted to bite-sized analytical problems and
unquestioned scientific materialism, the last idealist constructed his
philosophical system at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland--a stronghold
against the orthodoxy established by Oxford and Cambridge. Edinburgh was
one of the few places in the United Kingdom where one could study the history
of philosophy and particularly the idealism of Plato, Leibniz, Kant and
F. H. Bradley. It was in this connection that Alfred North Whitehead referred
to the city as "the capital of British metaphysics, haunted by the shade
of Hume." Sprigge occupied the Regis Chair of Logic and Metaphysics following
in the footsteps of Norman Kemp Smith, A. D. Richie and W. H. Walsh. He
was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in a city that
he described as a "breath of life to a metaphysician."

In contrast to the analytical philosophy bereft of wisdom,
or a purely academic and professional approach that treats philosophy as
a sort of technical problem-solving, Sprigge's system was constructed not
only as a quest to find a satisfactory view of the universe but also as
a search for the principles by which one could live in the world. He argued
that the only reality is consciousness and developed his views in opposition
to the dominant trends of the twentieth century. While the physical sciences
construct theories about the phenomenal world, it is only by way of introspection
and empathy that we grasp the true nature of reality as consciousness in
all of its manifestations in nature.

The noumenal world, or the world as it is in itself, stands
behind the phenomena as the true reality. This, for Sprigge, consists of
innumerable interacting centres or streams of consciousness. But consciousness
is a matter of degrees beginning with sentient experience of the most basic
units of reality to the conscious experience of human beings and ending
with the all-embracing Absolute. Our ordinary common sense, he thought,
was too incoherent to grasp the true nature of the universe. It serves
our practical purposes and allows us to interact and communicate about
the most mundane things, but ultimately fails as a satisfactory metaphysics.
Similarly, what Sprigge called the "world of science," serves practical
purposes to a much higher degreeóphysics, engineering, chemistry, biology,
medicineóbut only gives us abstract structures of the phenomenal world.
So, for Sprigge, the speculative metaphysician seeks the reality behind
the appearances, a world of direct acquaintance, and the scientist who
refines common sense seeks an account of the world of description.

A Metaphysics of Consciousness

Sprigge's methodology borrows much from James and Royce
who began the philosophical quest by an analysis of the specious present
of one's own consciousness. As he made the point

"if a philosopher would grasp reality in its
concreteness, and arrive at a philosophic position adequate to such grasp,
he must take the flow of his own experience as his paradigm example of
the true pulse of existence, and continually check the results of his reasonings
by reference back to it."

- Two Centuries of Philosophy in America,
ed. P. Caws (1980)

He believed that James's Principles of Psychology
(1890) provided the finest analysis of concrete experience particularly
through the development of the concepts of the specious present and the
stream of consciousness. From this pivotal work, he saw that James, Royce
and Whitehead all produced metaphysical systems that generalized from the
psychological concept of the specious present. So, the basis of Sprigge's
ontology, namely the momentary centres of experience, has an affinity to
James's drops of experience as one finds in his Essays in Radical Empiricism
(1912) and Whitehead's actual occasions in Process and Reality (1929).
He also notes that in Royce's The World and the Individual (1899)
the specious present plays a much grander role as the unifying experience
of the Absolute. Once one has a grasp of the intrinsic essence of a moment
of consciousness, one has the clearest conception of what it is to be a
noumenal reality, and by empathy one develops a sense of what it is like
to be another organism. Such a grasp of concrete reality is far greater
than any conception one might form of what is thought to be purely physical
or abstract reality. Sprigge initially developed this idea in his paper
"Final Causes" which was made famous in Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like
to Be a Bat?" Thus, whereas others flirt with panpsychism as a possible
solution to the mind-body problem and the problem of emergence, Sprigge
embraced it unabashedly for forty years of his career.

The monistic metaphysics that Sprigge espoused owes much
to Spinoza, for his views on the unity of God and Nature accord closely
with the Rationalist master. It was, however, Bradley's analysis of relations
that formed the basis of Sprigge's acceptance of the notion of a final
unity. Whereas Bradley argued that all thinking about plurality and relations
distort the true nature of reality, Sprigge developed the concept of holistic
relations as a means of understanding whole-part relations. Working from
within the stream of experience, Sprigge argued that the relation of momentary
durations is felt to be stronger at one end of the relation rather than
the other thus giving us the experience of asymmetrical relations in temporal
passage, but that any such stream also feels itself as part of a whole.
(Sprigge, 1983, pp 241) Neither spatial, temporal nor causal relations
provide the model for the sort of relation that Sprigge believes fundamental.
Instead, he viewed the specious present of a moment of consciousness as
his paradigm of a holistic relation and of how parts form wholes. Ultimately,
he argued that the plurality of finite centres of experience culminates
in one final whole, which occurs as one grand epochal moment or frozen
specious present. This is quite close to what Spinoza called 'God' or Bradley
called 'the Absolute.'

Eternal vs. Temporal: Critique of Process Philosophy

While Sprigge admired Whitehead's panpsychism, he was
one of the most acute critics of process philosophy. His main line of attack
focused on process philosophers' attempts to explain becoming and perishing
in the world and the development of novelty in a creative universe as in,
for example, Whitehead's Process and Reality . Sprigge also criticized
the process philosopher's notion of time and the central idea of process
theologyóthat God is in process with the world. His central objection to
Whitehead centers on the notion of the perishing of subjective immediacy.
Whitehead's explanation of process involved a mechanism of prehension and
objectification whereby an earlier moment must lose the immediacy of subjective
experience in order to be prehended by a successor moment and thereby be
objectified by the successor. Sprigge argued that he could make no sense
of a later experience containing an earlier one as opposed to some manner
of simply echoing it and that it was unintelligible how an experience that
has lost subjective immediacy could be the same particular as an element
in a successor. (The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 1983) For
him, this is because all moments of time are ontologically fixed within
the experience of the Absolute, and there is in reality no loss of subjective
immediacy. This involves a revisionary conception of time beginning with
Parmenides and Plato and continuing through to Spinoza, Bradley and J.
M. E. McTaggart.

For Sprigge, time is unreal. This means our ordinary common
sense conception of time as perpetually perishing and divided up into a
determinate, non-actual past, a determinate, actual present, and a non-determinate,
non-actual future is seriously flawed. In other words, from our limited,
finite perspective in time, sub specie temporis, the present is
real, the past fixed but quite gone, and the future to be decided, but
from the perspective of the final reality of the Absolute, sub specie
aeternitatis, all of time happens at once. Sprigge thus argued for
an eternalistic theory of time that combines the views of Spinoza, Bradley
and McTaggart with Santayana.

Each moment of time, each present conscious experience,
is intrinsically present and only relatively past or future. In this regard,
the moments of time are more akin to points in space. Sprigge fully accepted
Santayana's argument on the reference of propositions. For what makes propositions
about time true or false is a reality to which they correspond or fail
to correspond. So, for example, if the proposition that "Timothy Sprigge
died on 11 July 2007" is true, it is because the reality of Sprigge's death
on that day makes the proposition true and this reality does not fade or
perish as time passes. In fact, for Sprigge, his whole life from birth
to death forms a space-time worm within the Absolute and is just "eternally
there" as he liked to say. In this connection, he found Whitehead's notion
of objectification in God to be wholly unsatisfactory since it amounted
to claiming that our past lives, and indeed the whole past universe, become
nothing but a kind of cosmic memory in the mind of God rather than the
intrinsic presence of subjectivity eternally part of the Absolute.

Ethics Reconsidered: Against Anthropocentricism

Part of Sprigge's aim to construct a satisfactory theory
concerned the ethical implications of the metaphysical principles. The
panpsychism he developed has far-reaching consequences for how we should
respect the noumenal worlds of sentient creatures, including, of course,
human beings but extending far beyond our traditional ethical thinking.
Sprigge's ethics stands opposed to Christian thought or Kantian deontology,
according to which we only have direct moral obligations to other human
beings or, more generally, rational agents. His realm of moral obligation
includes non-human animals and even the environment, for sentience spread
through the universe, requires that we treat it with the respect due to
noumenal experience. He called his view, "way of life utilitarianism,"
primarily developed in his Rational Foundations of Ethics. Sprigge
owes much to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham in that it was Bentham
who argued that the basis of moral consideration was sentience rather than
the capacity to speak or think. In accordance with Bentham, Sprigge makes
a case for the role of pleasure and pain in the determination of value
but rejects any utilitarian cost/benefit analysis whereby certain intrinsically
bad actions might turn out to be morally permissible.

Sprigge was convinced that the focus on a materialist
or physicalist metaphysics had produced a distortion of our moral sense,
and, at its worst, a justification for cruel and callous practices such
as factory farming, vivisection and the destruction of eco-systems. It
is here that common sense, science, industry and government are allies
in immorality. Descartes' conception of non-human animals as mindless machines
allowed the early vivisectionists to dismiss any qualms they felt about
the suffering of such creatures in laboratories. This coupled with biblical
views about man's God-given place in the hierarchy has produced the dominant
tendency to treat non-human animals merely as objects to be manipulated,
eaten or exploited for any purpose. Sprigge fought back with a system of
thought that exposed the blatant anthropocentricism and he practised what
he preached. He converted to vegetarianism and became chairman for Advocates
for Animals, a group in Edinburgh that was involved in campaigns against
animal experimentation. In this role, Sprigge also participated in international
conferences devoted to exploring alternatives to the use of animals in
medical research.

Sprigge found religion in the Absolute, but religion stripped
of mythology, superstition and intolerance. Late in life he became a member
of the Unitarian Church, first in Edinburgh and then in Brighton, near
his home in Lewes. Here he seemed to have found some sort of spiritual
community among heterodox theists who sought a less dogmatic form of religious
belief. He re-wrote the Lord's Prayer along Spinozistic lines while believing
that it was pointless to pray to a God that was identical to the universe
and could not alter the course of time that was already fixed. In his final
illness, he requested that no animal parts be used in a heart valve operation.
One is reminded of George Bernard Shaw who said that his will should contain
directions for his funeral: his coffin was to be followed not by mourning
coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small
travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honor of
the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.

Final Assessment

Idealism is much less an option today than it was in the
nineteenth century because of its association with universal, absolute
religious principles and totalitarian, imperialistic political ideas. The
decline of such thinking, especially in England, was also marked by the
skepticism generated after the senseless carnage of World War I. For Sprigge,
all of this was irrelevant to his quest for a satisfactory metaphysics.

Today, the idealistic doctrines are generally regarded
as historically interesting but philosophically inconsequential. Idealism
is largely viewed as implausible because of its disregard for the physical
and biological sciences. Sprigge could rightly be accused of sidestepping
science in his attempt to arrive at first principles, and he was well aware
that his ignorance of science was a shortcoming of his philosophy. How
far metaphysical thinking could get at first principles without the aid
of detailed empirical studies was a great source of concern. He admired
Spinoza and Whitehead for their scientifically informed metaphysics.

Moreover, while Sprigge followed Bradley and Royce in
defending the sharp distinction between appearance and reality, or between
the investigations of structural phenomena undertaken by physical science
and those of introspective psychology, it is unlikely that physicists,
chemists and biologists see themselves as engaged in anything less than
a quest to know reality. Scientists do not see themselves as investigating
what is merely abstract or phenomenal but rather an underlying reality.
As far as the critiques of Russell, Moore and Ayer are concerned, the charge
that metaphysical construction is a sort of Hegelian megalomania has not
quite the force it had in the first half of the 1900s. The anti-metaphysical,
linguistic methodologies ran their course and eventually faced fatigue,
but the idea that idealism could serve as a metaphysical foundation for
any system adequate for the sciences is upheld by relatively few.

Sprigge's contribution to philosophy is difficult to access
given the neglect of his fellow countrymen. He is more widely appreciated
in the United States as an interpreter of classical American philosophy,
especially James, Royce and Santayana, and in the European continent as
a scholar of Spinoza and Bradley. What is little understood is the highly
original manner in which he constructed his own system of metaphysics,
which contains a penetrating and insightful grasp of consciousness and
the upshot of this for moral behavior. While Sprigge's philosophy might
seem oddly out of place in history, it has enduring value for the manner
in which he challenges our common sense views of mind, matter, time and
our treatment of non-human animals. On this last point, his ethics is clearly
in sync with a progressive movement that aims to reverse the disastrous
course that has resulted from viewing the world as mere matter in motion.